Despite being a medium often defined by "fun," video games are notoriously bad at being funny.

Granted, there are plenty of exceptions to the rule, with their numbers growing every year. But the team behind the newly released South Park: Fractured But Whole set out to push the boundaries of humor in games in the same way the show set out to push every conceivable boundary in animated comedy when we were first introduced to it.

In games, many point to classics like Monkey Island and the crass Conker’s Bad Fur Day as the height of comedy in games. But, in actuality, those (and most others) borrow from the same established humor techniques used in film or TV — delivering jokes almost exclusively through dialogue, text, or cutscenes.

The folks at South Park Studios weren't satisfied with doing that. They wanted to dive into the more uncharted, challenging territory of interactive comedy.

What does truly interactive comedy look like?

During a panel and private tour of South Park Studios, a small group of us learned about the ins and outs of the animated juggernauts' insane workflow — and how they worked tirelessly to port that same effort over to the game.

"There's a void in video games for comedy as an interactive experience," said the TV show's art director, Adrien Beard, who's worked at the studio since the '90s and still voices the character of Token. "There's just no standard for that in games yet."

Summing up the general state of comedy in games right now,Ubisoft San Francisco director and producer Jason Schroeder described how, "There's a lot of game humor that's only referential to game humor. It's not necessarily comedy, but more like puns in achievements or mission names. At least for the designers not working to crack this nut of interactive comedy."

By and large, the standard approach to humor in mainstream games is at best more of a bonus thought in addition to the bigger priorities of combat design, systems, and data that need to be polished to hell.

The reasons for that are multi-layered. And work to find a solution proved no easy feat.

Much of the difficulty for interactive comedy comes back to the clashing golden rules of interactivity and comedy.

After all, no standup comedian wants the constant interruption of a backseat participant, as any unassuming heckler will tell you. And no sane developer wants to add the nebulous, inexact art of comedy to the already unpredictable nature of game development.

"One of the biggest challenges with interactive comedy is obviously timing," said Beard. Humor lives and dies on a precise calculation of pacing and delivery. Meanwhile, players in an open world video game expect complete freedom.

"It was a learning experience for us because you can't let the player get to a spot too early and ruin your fart joke."

"It was a learning experience for us because you can't let the player get to a spot too early and ruin your fart joke. But then you also don't want to ruin their [agency], either. Giving players control of the world to tell the joke was really hard at first."

Ultimately, though, Beard said they relentlessly "chased the dream of creating the perfect interactive fart mechanic."

How to nail interactive comedy

Several other aspects of the partnership struck between Ubisoft and South Park Studios are counter to the many standards of AAA game development.

According to Schroder, "Initially, there was this impulse to pull back a lot — especially in the most uncomfortable bits. We even considered enabling an autoplay option for players who didn't want to participate in the lap dance mini-game, for example."

Wendy as Call Girl

Image: ubisoft, south park studios

He's referring to a mission in Fractured But Whole where the player (who, may we remind you, is playing as a 4th grader) must give a lap dance to a drunk strip club patron.

But the team discovered that giving players the option to opt out of this ballsy jokes rendered the core South Park-ness of the humor moot in the context of a game.

"Because if you don't actually participate in it, you can't really appreciate the joke. It matters that somebody is actually having to go through the motions of doing this ridiculous thing," said Schroder.

From the perspective of lead narrative designer Jolie Menzel, good interactive comedy depends on that more intimate relationship between joke teller and receiver.

"Because making the players party to the jokes — making someone fart on a man to interrogate him isn't just funny conceptually in a game context. You're also actually expected to do it. It heightens the asinine South Park humor by, in a way, making you culpable for all the horrible things you see done on in the show."

"It heightens the asinine South Park humor by, in a way, making you culpable for all the horrible things you see done on in the show."

So putting the joke in the player's (quite literal) hands became the team's mantra.

As executive producer Frank C. Agnone II said, they told Ubisoft from the get-go, "We're going to totally fuck up your workflow. Because you cannot work inside the box for something like South Park. You're going to have to change the way you make video games."

Ubisoft, the arguable bastion of standards in AAA development, said they went back to square one, reconsidering some of the most fundamental industry standards for "how a game should be made."

Generally, AAA designers start from a systems perspective. Instead, for this project, Ubisoft always put the comedy first. At times, they'd even scrap perfectly great video game levels — that apparently aced every traditional design principal — very late in development simply because it just didn't ultimately serve the story or jokes.

That's pretty unheard of for mainstream games.

They also ensured that their timeline, pipeline, and Snowdrop engine allowed for a similar editing cadence to the one Matt and Trey Parker have established for the show.

"The biggest lesson we took from the post mortem of Stick of Truth was that, in order to get the comedy right, Trey and Matt needed to have the ability to iterate. They needed to be able to change things easily," Schroeder explained.

Mysterion (AKA Kenny) overlooking the ruins of Sodasopa

Image: ubisoft, south park studios

Typically, prototyping in AAA game development centers around "greyboxing," which is a process in which the designers are able to experiment with super simple gameplay mechanic demos. The Ubisoft team used a similar method, but relied much more heavily on storyboards based on Matt and Trey's script, allowing them to get a realer sense of the location and narrative approach.

The creators would provide feedback and ideas, from story to mechanics, then the designers worked to embed them into another interactive storyboard. Then lather, rinse, repeat, until they nailed it.

A South Park game that's true to its roots

They called it "agile development," and it also gave Fractured But Whole the very trademark South Park ability to comment on the most recent events happening in the cultural zeitgeist.

Essentially, Ubisoft gave Trey and Matt the room to do their thing. And it paid off.

According to the team, the new pipeline allowed them to add levels of refinement to the comedy that made the game much more on par with the show's level of satirical commentary.

"I think we've made the funniest video game ever."

"I think we've made the funniest video game ever," said Schroeder. "I think [Fractured But Whole] is going to surprise a lot of people — not because of the shock value of the jokes, but in the sophistication of the story that ends up getting told."

Schroeder, Menzel, and Beard hinted at how Fractured But Whole has a much better grasp on the "larger picture" aspect of the comedy that raised the animated show to the level of cultural phenomenon that it is today.

"In part, no one's doing comedy because games are still struggling to be taken seriously, and want to have these serious underlying messages," said Menzel. "I believe we have that in our game.

"I mean, it's still South Park. It's still lots of farts, goofs, and juvenile humor. But there's this strong message, too. And I hope the game shows other developers that you can have both."

Ultimately, Menzel said, the lack of great interactive humor, "has gone on for far too long in games. We have this unique opportunity to tell jokes, to engage people in comedy in a way they never have before."

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